One Thousand Paper Cranes for Albus
by Antigone's Sister
Summary: The duel in 1945, its aftermath, and apologies for distorting Japanese folklore. Just to reassure you: no, Dumbledore isn't dying. This is mainly from Gellert Grindelwald's POV.


One Thousand Paper Cranes for Albus

* * *

AN: I distorted the legend of paper cranes a bit. They're supposed to cure the sick, not bring good luck. I suppose it could represent metaphorically curing the 'sick' relationship between Gellert and Albus. Yeah, I know, bit of a stretch. I just had this vision of Gellert at the Wizarding counterpart of the Nuremburg trials, and wrote a story around it.

* * *

There is a great bang and the world explodes into brilliant colour. He is vaguely aware that he has fallen to his knees, and that his wand hand is in terrible pain, and that this, for some reason, means that something terrible has happened, but he can't _think_ through the brilliance of the pain in his arm.

Blinking, the world comes back into focus, and he realises what has happened.

_Oh. Shit, _he thinks.

He is on his hands and knees – or rather, hand and knees, because, his right hand still hurts too much and he is cradling it against his chest. The Elder Wand is gone. He is breathing hard, and he can smell the strange smell of the mud beneath him that has been singed by their spells. Too winded to move, yet, he stares at it. It is terrible to look at, somehow: baked and cracked in some places; slimy, oozing, in others.

No one has rushed forward to help him stand, though he does not expect them to. His own people, he knows, are frightened that he will be killed if they approach…or that they will be, now that he can no longer protect them. As for the other side: the poor, deluded, _stupid_ wizards and witches, he imagines that they think his _evilness_ is catching, if they dare to touch him. Maybe that his spirit will leave his own, defeated body and possess theirs, use it too rebuilt his shattered empire…he wonders if he could do that.

No, he doesn't think so. At the very least, it would be far too risky.

But there is one person who is on neither side (at least, that's how he always though of it) and though he is the very person who is responsible for his current state of _(humiliation, defeat, kneeling alone in the mud while his dreams crumble) _Gellert is sure he didn't really mean it.

He raises his head to look for Albus, expecting to see him standing over his old friend, smiling smugly. _See, I am better_, the smile would say. _I won_.

But Albus is not there.

He looks around wildly. The English battle aurors are closing in, and _where is Albus?_

They lift him to his feet, and he is unresisting, still looking for Albus. Frantically, he turns his head this way and that. The aurors misunderstand his panic, and one laughs.

"Your armies have surrendered, Grindelwald. No rescue," he elaborates, when Gellert shoots him a confused glance, not understanding, so far away was rescue from his thoughts. Surely, Albus…

"No, no, no!" he yells, fighting suddenly, far too late (though there was never any hope of fighting them since the moment the Elder Wand left him). He breaks off his shouting just as suddenly, with a soft cry, they are tying his arms behind him and his arm _hurts_ – he sags against the auror who had laughed at him, gasping.

And now he understands, that Albus has left him, left him to the mercy of countless men and women who despise him, who have become so completely consumed by their hatred for him that their dearest wish is to cause him pain.

He understands that Albus has left _him_.

* * *

_The day is warm and lazy. They are sitting in the graveyard, now a favourite haunt of theirs, Albus leaning against a Peverell gravestone and Gellert sits cross-legged facing him. _

"_I learnt this from the charms teacher at Durmstrang," he says. "He was the first foreign wizard in 300 years to visit Japan, and he brought back all sorts of things. I st – he gave me some of them, but he taught us all this." Actually, the teacher had just taught Gellert, in a misguided attempt to get him to calm down and stop disrupting to class, who were trying to learn one of the spells that Gellert had used to make the eating hall inaccessible for three days running a few years ago. Gellert had only known his new friend a week, and did not want to send him running away from too quick an exposition to his ideas and his past. _

_Albus smiles at him, but looks more interested in Gellert himself than in what Gellert is saying. _

"_Really, it's fun. And it's supposed to give you good luck."_

_Albus laughs. _

"_Little bits of folded paper! They're not even magical!"_

"_Supposedly, you have to make one thousand of them for it to work." _

"_My apologies for sounding incredulous, Gellert, but it seems more likely to be a muggle superstition that anything else."_

"_That's very probable."_

"_Then…"_

"_I can still have fun with it, can't I?"_

_Albus considers him._

"_You've always shown the greatest distain for muggle customs."_

"_No," Gellert contradicts, "I have the greatest distain for muggle idiocy. It's not my fault if most of what they do falls under that category."_

_Albus laughs again. Gellert has noticed he laughs much more now, then when they first met. He assumes it was because of Frau Dumbledore's – Mrs. Dumbledore's –death. _

"_Very well, then, show me this great exception to the banality of muggle life."_

_Both leaning forward, almost, thinks Gellert, close enough to kiss, they share one paper as he guides Albus's long fingers through the steps. _

"_Congratulations," says Gellert. "It's a bird."_

"_Tweet," Albus whispers back, but Gellert doesn't think his friend understood the sentence, his mind on other things. A curls falls into his eyes, and Albus brushes it back, hesitantly moving forward…_

_Later, they find the crumpled paper crane underneath Albus' shirt, but Gellert says it doesn't matter. _

"_We'll make more," he says. "We'll make it to one thousand, one day." After all, they have all the time in the world. _

"Perhaps it will help us find the deathly h – " 

"Herr Grindelwald!"

Grindelwald looks up through hair that was one curly, now oily and disordered. He is slouched forward in his chair and imagines he looks somewhat like a cross between a schoolboy bored to tears in a history class and a mad scientist.

"Mr. Grindelwald," booms the American representative, and it seems he has rehearsed this beforehand, so pleased is he to have this duty, "do you have anything to say in your own defence before we pass the sentence?"

Gellert does not look at him. He considers what lays in his cupped hands.

Beside him, his lawyer is hissing at him frantically.

"For Merlin's sake, do something, say something, pretend you're sorry, or tell them how you were quite right to do what you did, do_ something_ – work with me here!"

Gellert tilts his head to the side. The chains around his wrists jangle as he flips the object about.

"I can only do so much, please, Herr Grindelwald, say something!"

"Mr. Grindelwald, if you have nothing further to say – "

The lawyer interrupts.

"He hasn't said anything at all!" He sounds defeated, but there is an undercurrent of hysteria to his tone.

"Mr. Grindelwald, this is you _last chance_ to defend yourself." The prosecuting and defending lawyers are in agreement over this, the defendant _must speak._

Gellert smiles, opens his mouth.

The courtroom is deathly silent, save for a couple gasps, and –

"He's going to say something!" That was from the spectator's gallery. Finally, after remaining silent for his entire trial, for a month and a half, he is going to speak.

"Tweet," he whispers to the small origami crane, held gently in his palm. And there is silence.

* * *

"Excuse me?" The bailiff is the first to speak.

"Nothing, nothing." Gellert thinks his lawyer might start sobbing. "He hasn't said anything, he has nothing to say."

"No, he said something," says the American representative. As if speaking to a slightly stupid child, "What was that, Mr. Grindelwald?"

And Grindelwald starts to laugh. Loudly, with gusto. The courtroom starts as one. Gellert laughs, and jumps to his feet.

"I have nothing to say to you, of you, for you, with your – folly, that will condemn you when the muggles rise up against you, which I tried to protect you from, your self-centred self-righteous dogmas that allow you to create your _very own_ new laws to try me – and, while doing so, you say my actions are a travesty of justice!" In his laughter he begins to sob. "I – said – TWEET! Tweet, tweet, tweet, Albus Dumbledore! That is all!"

He throws himself back down into his chair, rests his elbows on the table, and, covering his face with his hands, begins to weep with as much gusto as he had laughed earlier.

The rest of the room seems to have been stricken dumb. No one moves for what seems to be ages as he cries. Finally,

"He's gone mad." The whisper is hoarse and nobody seems to know who said it.

"Escort the prisoner back to his cell," says the American, but Gellert won't move.

His dreams are destroyed, now. His vision, his ambition, his passion, and any chance of love have been crushed, trampled on cruelly. The guards pick him up and their feet trample through the piles of paper cranes Gellert has folded day after day in the courtroom. Since the trial begun, he has made nine hundred and ninety-nine.

But Gellert knows that hope dies when you cease to believe in it, and that the smallest spark can light a forest on fire. So he holds the 1000th paper crane close to his heart, and doesn't let go.


End file.
